Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday December 22, 2012 @04:30PM
from the what-you-need-is-a-transplant-of-the-right-kind dept.

resistant writes "A limited study from China offers the tantalizing possibility that targeting specific gut bacteria in humans could significantly reduce the scope of an epidemic of obesity in Western countries: 'The endotoxin-producing Enterobacter decreased in relative abundance from 35% of the volunteer's gut bacteria to non-detectable, during which time the volunteer lost 51.4kg of 174.8kg initial weight and recovered from hyperglycemia and hypertension after 23 weeks on a diet of whole grains, traditional Chinese medicinal foods and prebiotics.' As usual, sensationalist reports have been exaggerating the import of this very early investigation, and one wonders about that 'diet of whole grains.' Still, there could be meat in the idea of addressing pathogenic bacteria for the control of excessive weight gain. After all, it wasn't too long ago that a brave scientist insisted in the face of widespread ridicule that peptic ulcers in humans usually are caused by bacterial infections, not by acidic foods."

In retrospect, I guess it couldn't hurt to mention at least one mass-media report [ft.com] that doesn't seem too excitable:

Researchers in Shanghai identified a human bacteria linked with obesity, fed it to mice and compared their weight gain with rodents without the bacteria. The latter did not become obese despite being fed a high-fat diet and being prevented from exercising.
The Shanghai team fed a morbidly obese man a special diet designed to inhibit the bacterium linked to obesity and found that he lost 29 per cent of his body weight in 23 weeks. The patient was prevented from doing any exercise during the trial.
Prof Zhao said such a loss in an obese patient using this diet was unprecedented. The patient also recovered from diabetes, high blood pressure and fatty liver disease.

It will be fascinating to see what happens when other teams try to replicate these results with larger, more statistically significant groups than just one individual. ^^;

Odds are that alcohol is absorbed by the body before it gets to the large intestine....Unless you intend to insert from the other end.

Sincerely,

The Party Pooper

Not to spoil your fun; but I've heard that is actually done, and is VERY dangerous.

Like the time I tried mixing vodka and Gatorade. It works; but is RIDICULOUSLY dangerous! I went from cold sober to throwing-up drunk in less than 30 minutes and about 6 oz. of my (much larger) drink. The Glucose in the Gatorade and the alcohol bond together, and (I think) they pass straight into the bloodstream.

Instestinal flora seems to have become something more scientists are looking into. The make up of the flora seems to have large number if influences. We may find even more surprises as more research happens.

The human body contains trillions of microorganisms — outnumbering human cells by 10 to 1. Because of their small size, however, microorganisms make up only about 1 to 3 percent of the body's mass (in a 200-pound adult, that’s 2 to 6 pounds of bacteria), but play a vital role in human health.

The NIH [nih.gov] is just starting to go there. It may well flip our understanding of how a number of disease processes unfold.

Researchers found, for example, that nearly everyone routinely carries pathogens, microorganisms known to cause illnesses. In healthy individuals, however, pathogens cause no disease; they simply coexist with their host and the rest of the human microbiome, the collection of all microorganisms living in the human body. Researchers must now figure out why some pathogens turn deadly and under what conditions, likely revising current concepts of how microorganisms cause disease.

Clearly the microbiota are biologically active - they produce, metabolize and secrete chemicals that interact with the human body. Not surprising that understanding that may help us understand the function and non function of ourselves.

In a sense, this isn't news. We've always known than humans are full of shit.

I read a few articles showing benefits of intestinal flora transplants from one individual to another. For example, this article discusses how it was shown to ease Parkinson's in certain cases (just the abstract, sorry):

Many things which travel through the gut don't cause a problem because the Cilia protect the digestive tract wall. When Cilia get damaged as with Crohn's Disease, then infection or inflamation can occur.

If the Enterobacter growth is enhanced by some items in the diet and suppressed by others that would not be surprising. If the Enterobacter or a product from that bacteria causes inflamation that causes the Pancreas to screw up the insulin production and regulation, that too would not be surprising.

It is only recently that investigation has begun to accelerate on what the effects of different bacteria in the gut are doing and why. Great article with potential for good results.

Bacteria in the digestive tract has everything to do with how well you can process food. I rather thought everyone knew this already but I guess I was wrong.

We also know that modified bacteria can do all manner of transformative magic from making alcohol to cleaning up oil spills. If it is indeed shown that a dietary supplement of bacteria or something like that could make it so that I can look and feel healthy like I was when I was in my 20s and 30s without all the diet and exercise I have to do, then br

Thanks. A bit of an eye-opener and a bit of a reminder of what I already understood in a more general sense.

It is with this knowledge I have to wonder why, outside of a hospital, people are so freaking obsessed with hand sanitizers and stuff. It would seem obvious there is potential for harm in using it all the time. If it weren't for MRSA I wouldn't have added the hospital exception, but thanks hospitals for breeding that for us.... now we can have infections that lead to complications like death and am

They are likely afraid of artificial sweeteners to and go for the "good natural stuff!"

Artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and a surprisingly large number of people in the general population are allergic to them. Aspertame gives me a migraine, for example... last time I accidentally consumed it, the headache lasted 3 days and left me barely able to get out of bed for long enough to eat or go to the bathroom.

If you're going to go for a "low calorie" substitute, use a natural one like agave. But avoiding sugars as a method to lose weight is a myth... on its own it will never be enough to los

There's a traditional Mexican preparation whose name escapes me at the moment. They ferment the agave, then distill it: this process removes all of the harmful sugars, and leaves only the healthful components. You should check it out when you get a chance.

The bacteria plays a roll in the "feeling full" mechanism. It's a symbiotic parasite, usually doing no harm.

It's not so simple to get rid of.

Consider helicobacter pylori, the bacteria linked to stomach ulcerations. The discovery is that high acidity of the stomach causes this bacteria to produce a protein that neutralizes the stomach acidity: and creates ammonia as a byproduct. Your body regulates stomach acidity with the aid of a hormone gastrin. So in return, to raise acidity, more gastrin is produces and thus more acidity. This causes the same feedback loop problem seen by a foods with a high glycemic index, and overcompensation results in harm to the body.

It's fairly widespread, and most of the time asymptomatic.

Antibiotics show the pitiful development of our medicines. They're more or less equivalent to nuclear bombs in pill form. They'll ravage good and bad bacteria indiscriminately, and may even create mutant bacteria resistant to the drug.

Really, it may just mean you need to make a dietary change to correct the problem. There's talk about the kinds of food we're eating that influence these bacteria to behave in certain ways, and about how diets low in calorie dense foods can correct this.

Here's an example, apparently the power-plant inside all our cells was once a separate living organism, and one day squillions of years ago one cell absorbed another without digesting it and through a magic more powerful than mere symbiosis Two Became One and the resulting biology was *significantly* more energy efficient.

It's entirely plausible that it's simply a case of whatever bacteria processing our gut contents significantly more efficiently and producing something useful to us as their waste product

If this turns out to have any truth to it, it raises two questions in my mind:

1. Why? What's the link between this bacteria and weight gain?2. What can we do? Is it possible to safely eliminate just this one bacteria via a vaccine or antibiotic?

Assuming this is true we probably acquired this bacteria hundreds of thousands of years ago because it helped us to build up fat reserves while we were still hunter-gatherers. There is nothing harmful about this bacteria it has been a useful symbiont that has been a key component in human survival for thousands of years, what is harmful is our modern lifestyle. What can we do about it? Exercising more and putting a stop to recreational eating would be a good start for most people. Knowing my fellow modern h

My guess is that like many other gut bacteria, it helps digestion. Without the bacteria, people become unable to digest certain nutrients. It sounds like a risky thing to try on humans, and could have some nasty longterm effects.

You know, that doesn't work for everyone. It sounds great when it works for YOU, but it's entirely possible to eat reasonably, exercise a lot, and *still* not lose weight. I exercise five days a week, two hours a day, and I'm not talking light exercise [staticflickr.com]. I don't eat sweets, I don't drink, I control my carbs, I make sure I don't drown in meat proteins... I *love* veggies and eat them every day, both salads and side dishes, and I *still* have trouble controlling my weight. Yeah, I'm strong and have stamina and flexibility -- all important targets for my undertakings -- but the fat wants to hang around regardless. I have *never* been "cut." Kinda sleek looking like a seal back in my teenage days, pretty big through the chest and shoulders, but even then I carried extra weight (i'm talking fat) on my thighs and ass. And I was active as hell. Caving, swimming, martial arts, biking, dragging musical equipment from gig to gig, rope climbing, pushing lawn mowers... I hardly ever sat still.

Today I have students that are so cut, so defined, so obviously on the extreme low end of the body fat range it would make you cry... and if that didn't do it, watching them wolf down $15 worth of McDonald's poison surely would. I can't eat that crap at *all* or my weight takes right off. Not that I really want to, but still, the message is clear: What makes me fat doesn't make you fat, and so forth.

Everyone's experience is not the same. Metabolism, infection, allergies, immune system fuckarows and Darwin knows what else...

"Exercise and eat healthy food" is not a universal prescription for "control body fat." It's just a good start for baseline health.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if someone identifies one (or more) independent factors that drive fat retention. I've suspected it for years.

Sounds like you may need to eat MORE protein. As far as I can tell, and I'm not a scientist or dietician, all the diets that work have a combination of more protein and less carbs. I cut my carbs down to 125 g per day and I lost 70 lbs in 9 months. But I greatly increased my intake of meat, eggs, cheese, nuts, etc. Any time I get hungry, I eat one of those and I feel full immediately.

greatly increased my intake of meat, eggs, cheese, nuts, etc. Any time I get hungry, I eat one of those and I feel full immediately.

I was about to post that I can just keep eating those, but on reflection you're right. Those food types do make me feel full up.

It doesn't stop me wanting to eat more though, and even they tend to make me feel full long after my body's had enough food. I just don't generate/receive/notice the right signals.

(I'm also comfort eating a lot of carbs, so stress is the single biggest cause of any excess weight I'm carrying at the moment, but that's a different story. Unfortunately comfort eating leads to feelings

Dr. Joel Fuhrman recommends making salad dressings from ground up nuts or adding things like avocados to get healthy fats into there. I agree good fats help in feelign full too. Joel Fuhrman talsk about the body's "appestat" that controls when we stop eating and how the main determinats are whether the stomach is full (fiber) and whether their are enough nutrients (su

energy in=energy out, sure. But how much of the energy in gets lost to inefficiency?

When I weigh less than 170, I can eat 3000 calories a day and not gain weight. If I manage to top 190, suddenly the same diet starts packing on more pounds and, worse, I can't get under 210 even reducing my calories to 1400.

If need to double my daily excercise routine at the same time, the weight slowly comes off, but as soon as I get back under 190, suddenly I start dropping a pound a day.

Conservation of energy... In an isolated system. The body isn't an isolated system. You only consider the input to the system, you aren't considering the outputs.

And outside of the physics angle, it's unhelpful to look at it that way. Whilst for sure over-eating is the fundamental cause, the implication that it's a matter of conscious willpower is wrong. The difference between well proportioned and fat people is not willpower. Mostly those well proportioned people aren't even trying. They are just lucky to have a body and/or subconscious mind that doesn't prompt them with hunger feelings as often and/or jumps in earlier to tell them they've eaten enough. It's a random physical attribute such as the colour of ones hair, not something to be proud or ashamed of.

Maybe this research will better explain this difference, and maybe it won't. But the difference is there.

Look, no one is arguing that starvation will leave you fat; eventually, you'll burn it. Unfortunately for simplistic reasoning like yours, the fat isn't always the first thing to go. It can be muscle tissue, organ tissue, etc. and there are many questions of various low level nutrient shortages that arise with extreme low calorie diets as well.

There are few subjects as rife with misinformation as diet; part of that is because we don't know what works for everyone, part of it is because there's an entire industry preying on those who are looking for various one-button solutions in that information vacuum. Not to be confused with the disinformation glut.

...and more fruits and beans, and a limited amount of nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Eat a lot less of everything else. See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live" for the details. Or for a slightly different approach, see the book "What Color is Your Diet" by David Heber, MD, PhD, founding director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, and dietitian Susan Bowerman, MS, RD. Or the book "The Pleasure Trap" by Doug Lisle and ALan Goldhamer. A great graph here:http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx [drfuhrman.com]

I lost 22 pounds in 6 months just by eating less. That was a year ago and the weight has not come back. I didn't change my activity or the type of food I ate (I don't eat junk food).Just weigh yourself daily and if your weight starts to go up, then eat less. Simple.Different people have different metabolism but everyone will lose weight when they eat less than the calories they burn... basic thermodynamics.

Your metabolism can only adjust so far, and it's not actually all that far. If that weren't true, then people wouldn't starve to death, their metabolism would just keep adjusting until they could live on practically nothing.

Restrict your caloric intake to, say, 1500 calories per day, and you'll lose weight, and you'll keep losing it as long as you maintain that. Include some strength training to avoid also losing muscle tissue. When you reach your target weight, increase your intake to normal, but weigh yourself daily and monitor your weight tend, if it starts trending upward, reduce your food intake slightly. Continue tuning your intake until you are at the weight you want and staying there. Once you've got that figured out, continue weighing yourself daily and adjusting if the trend lines go too far out of whack.

Easy, right? Well, no. Controlling calorie intake is not easy. It takes a fair amount of work to track what you're eating, and a lot of discipline. Technology can help, though, a lot. Use a smartphone app to log everything you eat and the exercise you do. Get a Wifi-enabled scale (I have the Fitbit Aria) and stand on it every morning, then use another tool (I use the trendweight.com web site) to track your trend lines.

It works. I was at 240, and am now at 200, where I've been for a year. I've decided that I really need to be about 180, so I'm going to get focused on lowering calorie intake again starting after the holidays. I target a 1000-calorie daily deficit, which is pretty danged steep, but results in a consistent two pounds per week of weight loss, so I should be down to 180 by mid-March, late March at the latest.

Dunno why this was moderated 0. It's fairly sound advice. At the age of 45, I lost 40 lbs this way, going back to the shape I was in my 20s, even though I did not put forth any effort to restrict or count calories, and I only exercised 15-20 minutes a day. Everyone I know who has done this has experienced good results. I will say that I think different people have different ratios of the above that are optimal for them. Some need more meats and fats, others need more vegetables and fruits.

If this turns out to be true, every MOTHERFUCKER who's ever called someone fat or blamed them for their weight is going to have the shit beat out of them by a mob of angry newly-skinny people with incredible core body strength.

This has actually been studied quite extensively in the last few years, mostly by American researchers. They've been able to show how that mice fed samples of this bacterium will gain weight drastically. Basically, the bacteria process certain sources of food that we're bad at absorbing and make it easier for us to absorb them. It's believed that there's an immunological mutation (which is otherwise all but harmless) that lets them proliferate excessively in humans (defence against flagella, I think), so one can actually say that obesity is genetic, albeit indirectly so.

But that all being said, while careful diet control is certainly effective for mitigating digestion-related problems, this study isn't a cure so much as a band-aid. I'm pretty sure anyone would lose weight and eliminate unwanted intestinal flora under the intake suggested.

Funny seeing the subject of gut bacteria in a/. forum.Just last week I was reading an article on the Mercola.com site, link here: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/18/mcbride-and-barringer-interview.aspx

Gut bacteria has much more to do with overall health in general that most people think.Weight loss being linked to having all the right bacteria in the gut is also a bonus

While what you're saying is true, many of the claims on that page are difficult or impossible to substantiate. The mention of fibromyalgia in particular is a good indicator that you're reading trash, since it has no concrete medical definition. Steer clear.

Wow, miss the point much? Fibromyalgia is a catch-all term for a large number of uncharacterised diseases and disorders. It's not wrong to claim it exists, only that it's sufficiently well-understood to say that a single form of treatment can cure it.

You're right; I was remembering something from a seminar I attended a few months ago and it may've been a bit mushy. I was really convinced that the Enterobacter problem had something to do with the abundance of short-chain fatty acids, but now that I dig into it it's pretty clear that the literature focuses on endotoxins.

If you feed anyone a special diet they can lose weight. Also note, their diet included "certain Chinese herbal medicines." So sure it worked, it worked just fine. And the media that covered it fell for that hook line and sinker. Including slashdot.

Now if these results came out of a real double blind study with controls and whatnot (like more than one patient?) this would be an interesting story. Now, it'll just generate diet spam.

From the point of view of gut bacteria, we are just hosts serving their purposes as transportation and food suppliers. If they can get more food by releasing the right kind of chemical signals into our system, they will. This is a real life example of the way the fictional Goa'uld parasites treated their human hosts. But bacteria are not aliens, they are actually derived from the same ancient ancestors as us.

Occam's razor applies. The only thing that directly affects your weight is what you put into your mouth. Genes and anything else is bullshit. You won't get fat by eating only leaves of salad every day for your entire life no matter how fat your parents are. STOP BELIEVING THERE IS A SECRET BEHIND OBESITY, THERE ISN'T.

Stop fucking blaming the patient! You know why 90%+ of diets fail long term? Because it's FUCKING HARD TO LIVE LIKE THAT ALL YOUR LIFE. If you don't have a weight problem, and if you feel full and satisfied after a normal meal, you will just never understand the INTENSE agony of constantly being hungry and feeling hungry 20 minutes after a FUCKING LARGE MEAL, Yeah sure, if you can live like a buddhist monk and excercise like fucking Rambo for the rest of your life, you can lose weight. You know what though?

I literally ate 10,000 calories a day and didn't gain an ounce. I drank a full 8 pack of 16 ounce pepsi bottles every day, ate a large bag of potato chips and a pound of cheese every day. This is on top of a large breakfast, lunch, afterschool dagwood sandwiches, huge supper with seconds at every meal. After dinner I would eat chips, more cheese, other snacks and popcorn loaded with butter. For breakfast I would eat a stack of 10 pancakes, a couple of boiled eggs, a 6 egg omlet, toast, sausage, bacon,

So here's a correlation confound. Your gut bacteria is a big function of the kind of diet you have. This is advertised heavliy by the yogurt people: live-culture yogurts to help get you "regular", yucko. So people who eat more yogurt will have more acidophilus and lactobacilli. Those who eat meat (and particularly poorly cooked meat) will tend to have bacteria associated with those meats. Beef-eaters may have more e. coli (Jack-in-the-Box infected burgers, anyone), chicken-eaters may have more salmonella than others, and pork could mean many bacteria and even trichinosis (worms) or brain-monsters..
So since your meat-eating habits may influence your bacteria, cutting down on meat will simultaneously improve your dietary intake and change your gut bacteria. This creates the confound. Is it the bacteria that created the bad health, or was the bacteria another symptom of the bad health that came along with the unhealthy diet?

This study is not an isolated case regarding the issue of bacterium-mediated weight gain.

There have been several studies which clearly indicate that there appears to be a case for "(at least some) people have excess weight due to 'which bacteria inhabit their gut' " or something approximating that.

Yes folks, I said DUE TO, ie caused by the bacteria not the other way around (in at least one case, administering a certain bacteria caused not just scientifically significant but visibly large weight gain on the exact same diet, at least in rats).

As yet there's no conclusive proof (ie several repeated tests independently verified) with hard science numbers (not to mention something of an explanation why/how this works) and, and no magic cure for fatness, but science is nowhere near laughing this off as 'mere crackpottery'.

There's VERY OBVIOUSLY something going on here with certain bacteria and (at least) some overweight people, and scientists (all over the world, not "just someone I've never heard of in China") are turning up results from a variety of research projects (all with slightly different angles) all pointing in the direction of "this is starting to smell just like That Stomach Ulcer Thing".

A page about nutrition and what science has to say about it. All videos have links to the original research so that you can check that the good Dr isn't making shit up.There are a few videos about endotoxins and their effect. Feel free to have a look.http://nutritionfacts.org/index.php?s=endotoxins [nutritionfacts.org]

The guys solution is probably not what most people have in mind.So far I haven't seen anyone well researched refute the guy.This was the video lecture that got me interested in what he had to say: http://nutrition [nutritionfacts.org]

Why can't there be multiple issues? We do have the people that overeat, but there's more that a few people that have had problems with obesity and no one quite understands what the real cause is. There can always be multiple causes and multiple solutions (or not one single solution).

Why can't there be multiple issues? We do have the people that overeat, but there's more that a few people that have had problems with obesity and no one quite understands what the real cause is. There can always be multiple causes and multiple solutions (or not one single solution).

It's more than just that. Controlled studies where volunteers spent a couple weeks locked in a research facility eating only the precisely measured meals given to them by researchers showed variations in weight gain/loss, even after accounting for muscle mass, overall health, and amount of exercise the volunteers engaged in. Some participants lost weight, some stayed relatively the same, and some gained weight.

A persistently (and severely) restricted diet will eventually overcome all other factors and force you to lose weight, but it is obvious that some people absorb way more calories from the same meal than others. If the gut bacteria are breaking down certain complex carbohydrates, starches, etc that would otherwise go undigested, they could easily account for the difference.

In fact, in a famine or food-poor situation, such bacteria would be evolutionarily selected for, as they would give the carriers a leg-up, allowing them to stay healthy and non-malnurished while their neighbors starved.

He, along with many others in here, are saying that more end up being taken out than going in. In simpler terms, you'd shit out some undigestable matter instead of it being absorbed and kept in your body, since the bacteria might be what's making it digestable.

Gut bacteria and other factors can change things up to a small degree, but you'll never get around the basic physics of your metabolism. Expend less energy than you consume, and you will gain weight. Expend more than you consume, and you *will* lose weight. You cannot gain weight if you don't consume enough food to keep your body running anymore than you can continue driving a car on an empty tank.

That said, there are some drugs that prevent certain types of "nutrients" from being digested (e.g. Lipitor mak

Gut bacteria and other factors can change things up to a small degree, but you'll never get around the basic physics of your metabolism. Expend less energy than you consume, and you will gain weight.

That's very oversimplified to the point of being almost wrong. The problem is that your metabolism varies depending on how much energy is available. If you cut your calorie intake to try to lose weight, your cells slow down their metabolic rate to compensate, and you're still expending no more energy than you consume. When the system is calibrated correctly, people keep a fairly constant weight no matter how much or how little they eat. When the system is calibrated wrong, people can't lose weight no matter how little they eat. There are things you can do to improve your odds, such as starving yourself for one day every few days so that your body does not adjust to the reduced calorie consumption, but that only goes so far.

And although you are correct that consuming sugars and starches instead of fats and proteins makes this problem worse, high protein diets are hard on your kidneys, heart, etc. So that's not a fix, either. The right fix is to figure out why the whole system is out of balance and fix it.

Truth. There are dozens of potential pathways. My sister fell incredibly ill with a body-wide infection that near killed her in 2002. Like everyone else in my family she'd *always* been one of those people who could eat anything she liked and gain no weight. She's 5'10", was slim to the western celebrity ideal, and had done a little modeling. Her gut shut down and only after months of care could she come home - she left the hospital after four months with damaged kidneys and weighing more than when she went in, and over the next three years she continued to gain. Now she struggles to keep under 280lbs and she eats less than a quarter her previous diet. The rest of us eat freely and we're rake-thin - and by freely I mean we're all around the 5k calories a day mark while she's struggling to stay under 1500.

What happened? Logically I can only guess she began using more of the food she ate towards stored energy, or lost the ability to expend energy as much, or a mix of both. Maybe my brother and other sisters waste a lot of our energy intake, maybe we expend a lot by the nature of our metabolisms. Maybe my sister's gut bacteria died and whatever organism pushed changes in dietary absorbtion up had a chance to flourish at the expense of a 'healthier' flora. Maybe damaged organs change the ratio she stores vs expends.

What I'm getting at is "I thought it was over consumption of calories" like the gp suggested is a far too simplistic a suggestion - calories in vs calories out is obviously a valid equation at the root level, but calories put in the mouth do not equate to calories usable by the body and *that* does not equate to calories actually used by the body. I overconsume and I'm thin and metabolically healthy by all standards I've ever needed to be tested for. It's about as useful a suggestion for reasons of obesity as "I thought life was consumption of oxygen". Yeah, there's a link, but.... no.

There are indeed multiple causes.1) Eating to much2) Not moving around enough

I am overweight, yet I do not blame anybody but me. I do not exercise enough and I eat to much and unhealthy. When I bought my car, it started. Instead of walking to the bus/train each day for about 20-30 minutes and then from there to work. Instead of walking to the stores two or three times a week, which took another hour per time, I walk 20 meters to my car, sit in it and then walk 20 meters to my office.

This is hardly a fringe position. I only add the suggestion to it that rather then start with crazy fad diets (that have zero "peer-reviewed studies"), that people start simply by not eating trash like pure sugar and pounds of cheese. If you need a "peer-reviewed study" to convince you that not eating complete shit is a good thing, you're already beyond hope.

And I add the advice to those who have fat friends and family, to stop giving them "gifts" of complete shit such as candy and pounds of cheese.

None of this is the slightest bit outrageous. But ya know what is outrageous? You and your ilk that demand "peer-reviewed studies" before you'll even consider the idea that chowing down on donuts and brie might not do wonderful things to your waist line.

Let's introduce something into your gut that throws off the horomones which control your hunger response. See how well you cope when you go around all day feeling unsatiated no matter what you eat.

Not saying bacteria is all of it, but it's damn well within the realm of possibility. Maybe science will find a fix for this "weak will power" that many people get chided over, and at least we may have one reasonable solution to the obesity problem without having to hear so much bitching and criticism over it.

I forget the name of the recent female surgeon general who said the only diet that works is "Eat less, move more." No starvation diets, sensible portions eaten regularly, else your body goes into 'starvation mode' and saves/retains every calorie. Supposedly,it's an evolutionary trait from when a human might go weeks without food.

You're not fat because of ANYTHING except long term consumption of more calories than you burn

If you consume a million twinkies encased in a metal cylinder, you won't gain an ounce. You have to absorb the nutrients. The bacteria are most certainly a factor in how the nutrients get processed and eventually absorbed. With the right engineering, the metabolome could be designed such that you could eat forever without becoming obese. There's more than one way (or even two ways) to solve any problem.

It may be a colossal waste of human and natural resources to do that engineering, but that doesn't jus

You are correct, however, as a person who has lost 30kg and kept it off through diet and exercise, I know that I have to eat less and do more than many people I know. I would be very happy to be able to change my gut bacteria and be more relaxed than I have to be now. I train 12-14 (hard) hours a week and am constantly aware of my kilojoule intake. It would be nice to not have to fight every day to maintain a healthy weight. My brothers did not put on weight easily on the same intake and I was more active t

Sure, for some people it's that simple. For others its like telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking, or a smoker to just stop smoking, or a meth addict to just stop taking the stuff.

Yeah, some people, maybe most, can do that. Some people can even shoot heroin without getting addicted to it. Probably most people could lose weight if they were just willing to focus on it. (I'm down 55-60 lb from my peak, from techni

This doesn't explain how some people are able to eat a lot of calories without gaining weight.

He didn't claim that everyone's metabolism was the same, some people have tapeworms, some don't chew their food properly, none of that alters the basic physics.

I'm old enough to remember the last of the Chinese famines. A famine is a catastrophe that all to often befalls large populations, and all too often is a direct result of government policy. Why the hell are westerners all worked up about an "obesity epidemic"? The fact that it is even possible

If you eat more calories than you burn, you get fat.If you burn more calories than you eat, you get skinny.

It isn't that simple. I eat whatever I want and don't workout much and I haven't been able to gain weight ever in my life, and I have tried. I lived off of fast food lunches for several years when I was single but for some reason my body doesn't respond to the calories. I don't have high cholesterol or high BP and the doc says I am healthy - just skinny. I have met several people like me, and others that I know that (if they ate what I ate) would balloon up rather quickly.

This is like saying that my Ferrari beat your Yugo because I pumped more gas into it.

Never mind hunger. What if you feel like you're going to pass out after you run a mile? What if you feel like you're going to fall asleep after two hours at the desk? You find that calories allow you to run 2 miles, or get through 8 hours of work. Alas, there is a side effect. What do you tell the overweight office worker who is in this situation? Quit office work and climb transmission towers?

You're naive. What you are saying is equivalent to saying that the toilet cistern overflows because there is too much water going into it. Someone who actually understands the problem (a plumber) would point out it's because the ballcock is faulty.

The issue of obesity is not one of physics, nor of willpower. It's of understanding why some people's sense of saity works well, and other people's doesn't. Lots of people have theories, every diet fad puts forward a new one. But as yet no one knows for sure. It r

Is it too outlandish to consider that perhaps having a certain bacteria could cause you to metabolize foods differently, resulting in weight gain regardless of diet and exercise?

Really -- it's not that outlandish an idea. Of course a good diet and exercise are splendid -- but the fact is there are millions of people who do diet and exercise see very poor results compared to others.

This is false. My wife can eat 1200 calories on a given day and still gain weight. I can eat 3500 calories in a day and still lose weight. The issue is the level that your body is able to break down certain foods. Example: Eat a 2000 calorie meal. Just because the meal is 2000 calories doesn't mean that 2000 calories go into your body. Certain fats, proteins, etc. don't break down in each person the same way. One person might get 1800 calories from that meal, another person 1300. Also, insulin levels and the like prevent you from burning fat.